Yep, so one thing to clarify is that this first rev is a prototype run of just 5 boards for testing purposes (also testing out our manufacturer to see how reliable their process is). We are still refining the design and will need a little more time to prove out the capabilities. Our goal is to be able to expand the usage of the board to include additional controllable outputs for RGB led strips (the two 3-pin connectors you see at the bottom of the board). I would love to be able to have 3 independently controlled RGBs for backbox, speaker, and undercab lighting in addition to the controllable LED strip, but we may not have the board real estate unless we convert over to SMD (in which case we get a LOT of extra board space to do cool things).

This is *my* first attempt at this type of PCB design, so if any of you old hats have suggestions for improvements or other ideas, let me or Prof_Pinball know!

-Wes

Right now, as it sits, 3 "mods" can be connected. One addressable LED strip and up to 2 RGB LED strips. BUT, since it's Arduino based, you have access to all the pins and you could really go crazy if you wanted to do your own thing. Would really like to expand upon the 'baked in' mods, and will, as we continue through this phase of the design.

The PIG2 is pretty freaking awesome. This is different in a lot of ways, but mainly from the perspective that the inputs for this "Pinduino" are coming from the flasher inputs (J6 and J7) and the code is driven by the Arduino SDK, meaning open source code development and hopefully a growing repository of code that will enable all sorts of cool mods. The ultimate goal of this thing is to basically allow you to get signals in from pinball machine, and then once you have the signals available on the Arduino platform, you can really do anything you want with it, from controlling LEDs to servos to even connecting to your Philips HUE or your refrigerator!

-Wes

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Hrm. How many of these games now have obligatory Aux boards? If there are a fair number of games that ship with Aux boards, we could probably find some room on the Pinduino.. I do like being able to tie into the GI on these LEs...

Word of warning, I'm not committing to ANY of this stuff. I want to do ALL THE THINGS! But we will probably end up doing a much smaller subset based on price and ease of integration.

-Wes

WOO! Alrighty folks, I'm pretty excited to show this off, we finally got the upgraded boards in! I soldered all this stuff on real quick and now I am off to testing in Ironman and Tron, but I wanted to get a couple of pics up here in between football games.

The first photo is just the raw board, without anything soldered on, and the next photos are some of a hastily hand assembled board, attached to an Arduino Due, that we can use to test out the PCB itself and the new Arduino code!

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Hey guys, assembling your own ribbon cable with a .156->.100 reduction is hard. Just saying. Lessons learned everywhere on this one. Hopefully will have the ribbon cables for the prototypes assembled soon...ish.

-Wes

Building out the addressable led functionality on the Pinduino.

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Updated the github with a couple of new functions that we hope to use inside Speaker Grills..

Addressable LED Functions available. All as easy as calling a function in the Arduino Sketch:

Continuing to add to the library. Now we can throw multiple bullet fx into the addressable strip.

This is a cool idea, especially for CFTBL. You can pretty easily make a new function that alternates the flashes on every other LED, just like the game does. Keep us updated!

-Wes

Hrm... Good point. Check these out though... They'll set you back a few more dollars, but a pair of these should integrate directly into Pinduino, and would look cool under the whirlpool...(disclaimer: we haven't tested these specifically, but they do use the same library)

http://www.adafruit.com/products/1586 - NeoPixel Large Ring
http://www.adafruit.com/products/1463 - NeoPixel Small Ring

-Wes

Exactly our thinking too!

-Wes

We're still working on getting a web portal setup, but you can send a PM to prof_pinball and he'll get you set up!

-Wes

In my experience the knockoff boards work fine and are reliable given a few details.. I do hear a lot of the issues on the knockoffs are on input voltage tolerance. If you are relying on the voltage regulator (we aren't) or are concerned about unregulated voltage on the input pins (we aren't), they seem to be a good value.

-Wes

All I have to say is I'm super f*ing excited to see these kits getting used for stuff like this. Thank you! The unassembled kit is being sold at just about cost for this reason.

We're still actively developing the code (new light effects, new uses) and we're looking forward to see what other great (and better) ideas are out there!

-Wes

Thank you! Love the ground lighting, we may have to go ahead and integrate that into a couple of our machines we are taking to Zapcon this year. Running RGB strips at the same time as an addressable strip should work great in the current architecture, I just haven't gotten around to getting off my duff and doing it on ironman. I'm imagining blasting purple undercab and speaker lights for when you hit monger, green when whiplash, etc. Basically the same setup you have going on here.

-Wes

fattdirk:

Ok, let's start here... Did you import the library?

Library.png

Gotcha. Ok, so it looks like a minor issue to clean up. Clean everything up and re-add the library. You can manually delete the pinduino library from the arduino/libraries tree structure, and then follow this series of steps to re-add the library.

http://arduino.cc/en/guide/libraries

-Wes

Also, what wolfmarsh said. You probably have an extra layer of folders. You can clean it up as above, or you can just manipulate the folder structure if you are confident in doing that.

Hey, glad that worked! thanks for the feedback, I'll let our technical writer (lyonsden) know that he needs to fix his guide!

-Wes

Here's what I've found so far:

1) Multiple RGB Strips? No Problem. Sequencing and Blocking is no problem.
2) Multiple RGB Strips and 1 Addressable LED. No problem, you can set up the RGB strip to latch to a color and then do your Addressable LED routines.
3) Multiple Addressable LEDs, controlled sequentially? No problem, the routines will not interfere with each other.
4) Multiple Addressable LEDs, duplicated? No problem, wire them in parallel.
5) Multiple Addressable LEDs with unique functionality? Uh oh. This is where things get interesting.

If you want a strip of say 10 LEDs to do something different than a strip of 50 LEDs AT THE SAME TIME, then we have to start messing around with pseudo multitasking using interrupts, OR, you need to throw in another microcontroller (to give you true multitasking), OR, you need to develop your own Addressable LED control routine (going away from NeoPixel). We were looking into this but then we didn't see a real use case for enabling this functionality (we can cheat this most of the time by doing one of the other 4 options above). We may get to it eventually, but that's the great thing about Open Source, someone else can do it!

-Wes

YEP! Wire it in series and you can absolutely do this. We are testing that with a speaker light + ramp light combination right now.

I think there's a ton of room to improve that side of the code. Today, we are pretty much keying off of a single flasher, but if you are smart, and you really understand the game, you can decode specific states based on a complex flasher sequence. For example, in Spiderman, for Battle Royale, each flasher bank pulses in a sequence that you could define as uniquely "Battle Royale", and then you could do something interesting with that (like lighting the right lamp, for instance). That takes a little more work to do, but as a thought experiment, completely possible.

-Wes

Agreed with Eric. Do it to it.

-Wes

Nerd Talk Begin.

DK, thanks for that explanation. To give you some background, the Pinduino input side functionality is basically set up like you mention, we check the states of the inputs, and the update an array with those states. Then, later on, we do something based on the values in that array. This lets us control RGBS easily. The interesting bit comes in dealing with an addressable LED, where you are basically giving control over to a library that then takes a VERY random amount of time to update the light strip with whatever effect you are trying to achieve. This delays the loop, if you are addressing 50 LEDs that takes a LOT longer than updating, say, 2. That makes things WAY less deterministic/consistent. That, overall, is NO BIG DEAL as long as you are A-OK dealing with everything serially (i.e. Update RGB1, Update RGB2, show light strip effect 1, show light strip effect 2).

However, if you try to do things in parallel (i.e. Show light strip effect 1 AND 2), then you start dealing with some neat timing issues you can't easily take care of due to the way the neopixel library works. NOTE: I said "easily". It's not impossible. I have some ideas on how to pull this off effectively, but it's going to take a little more time for us to develop that in a way that is easily USEABLE by the community without hacking away on our libraries. The good news is on a MEGA2560 platform you get 16Mhz to deal with, which should allow us to do fast, unique LEDstrip effects on 2 strips at the same time. But, even now, you can kind of fake it treating everything serially, OR by duplicating the effect to both strips.

-Wes

There's no ACK. NeoPixel basically just lets you set pixel colors:
strip->setPixelColor(position,R,G,B);

But in order to do fancy effects (like crawl effects or bands that move), you spend a lot of time in loops updating the pixel values. If you have 4 pixels you are tracking, no big deal, if it's 138, that's a different story... NOTE: "Lot" of time is relative to clock cycles here, not necessarily talking about even milliseconds of time. That's time where literally nothing else can happen, and you are doing it in EVERY LOOP execution. I'm sure there's cool ways to optimize that with arrays or pointers or something, but I'm far too lazy to deal with that, since there's no real need to do that right now. Maybe lyonsden in his copious free time can get on that!

The status LED is a great idea. So is an oscope. I still haven't graduated into owning my own oscope, however, it's next on the list. So much guesswork and troubleshooting code can be eliminated with an oscope.

-Wes

Which Logic Analyzer do you use? I've been looking to ebay to pick up an older oscope, but may just end up getting the cheapo rigol if I can't find anything on ebay. For logic analyzers, I figure I'll just go with a PC USB based one, but the prices and quality seems to vary WILDLY.

-Wes

Hahaha. Brilliant! Before posting this I did JUST THAT. Admittedly, eevblog has like 1000 videos, and the forums over there are pretty good. The Rigol would be the purchase I would make TODAY if I didn't want to find a DEAL on CL or ebay.

-Wes

Haha, yeah, we are here. Zapcon sapped *my* energy, and my wife's tolerance, then the Goonies pin arrived and I've been tied up playing with that, which reminds me, I have some posts to do over there...

Hey Wolfmarsh, you rock.. This is awesome, and dead simple to have printed and assemble. I hate IDCs as well, and the wiring harness was always a spot that could use improvement in our design. We kicked around ideas like this but at the end of the day we decided to get product out even though it wasn't 100% PERFECT. Another bonus to open source design! Other people can improve it!

Oh, and I COMPLETELY agree with lyonsden, time to move to fully assembled PCBs for the next project. I've done enough soldering for the year, and desoldering for that matter.......

-Wes

I'm in the process of acquiring a 3d printer. Partially related to pinball, but really planning on using it for another project outside of this hobby. Just got to finalize on which one. So many choices, analysis paralysis ensues.

Anyway, that's beside the point. One thing I've discovered is we should have drilled holes to access the normal mounting holes on the Arduino Mega. Add another feature for the next rev of Pinduino!

-Wes

Also, folks, if you do want to go through the process of ordering these boards for yourself, let me or Eric know. I can walk folks through the process. I mean to eventually have a tutorial for the full end to end process (From EAGLE schematic to board to ordering and delivery), but with a new job I've been burning the candle at both ends and just haven't had time to do it.

-Wes